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Maryland Governor Wants Voting Paper Trail
smooth wombat writes "Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said Wednesday that he has lost confidence in the state's ability to hold fair and secure elections this fall, and called for paper receipts for Maryland's electronic voting machines,and the delay of early-voting procedures approved by the Democratic-controlled legislature." From the article: "'In light of these recent national decertifications and the Maryland General Assembly's decision to override my vetoes ... I no longer have confidence in the State Board of Elections' ability to conduct fair and accurate elections in 2006,' said Ehrlich, a Republican, in his letter to Board of Elections Chairman Gilles W. Burger. Democrats criticized Ehrlich's apparent shift on the paper-receipt issue, noting that he vetoed a bill last year that would have studied the option. Advocates of reforming the state's voting system cheered Ehrlich's remarks, which he made a day before a Senate committee is to hold hearings on a bill that would require a paper trail. "
Maryland Governor Wants Voting Paper Trail
Congratulations, so do your constituents.
Developers: We can use your help.
Because if one has a verifiable paper trail it makes it that much harder to rig an election.
Don't get me wrong, I use ATMs all the time, and trust it with my money, so I don't see why it should be so hard to come up with a secure and easy way to use voting machines.
This is the same thing I keep harping on. The usual response from Diebold (and others) is that because it is electronic there is no need for a paper ballot.
So is adding/withdrawing money from an ATM. You shouldn't need a receipt to verify that the correct amount of money was withdrawn from your account because it's all electronic.
The same thing goes for grocery shopping. Since it's all electronic there shouldn't be a need to have a paper receipt of all your purposes. You should be able to trust the system didn't overbill you for a product or add in products you didn't buy.
But hey, who am I to use logic when talking about a verifiable paper trail. After all, I should just accept that the government is always right in these matters because the companies making these products have told them there is nothing to worry about.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The concept of a paper trail or voter receipt or whatever you want to call it is stupid. Just imagine a paid thug taking people to the polling place and then asking to see their paper receipt to make sure they voted "the right way".
You don't take the paper ballot home with you. You put it in a locked box, where unlike electronic ballots it cannot be invisibly changed later.
How will you handle "wrong" votes? Where will you change them? When will you change them? How long will people have to change their mind?
By destroying the original paper ballot and printing out another; in the polling booth; while you're voting; until you've put your ballot in the box. Note that you can still have computers print out the ballots if you want - and you may want to, so they can prevent voters from accidentally choosing two candidates in the same race, help read to blind voters, warn voters who may have unintentionally missed casting a vote, and make long ballots easy to read. What is important is that the final official ballot is in an immutable human-readable form that gets checked by the voter before it is cast.
If I'm smart enough to hack votes inside a machine, why would you assume that I'm not smart enough to spoof the paper trail?
Because hacking into a computer that your opponents are watching requires you to be smart, but hacking into large numbers of ballot boxes that your opponents are watching requires magic.
Want to make elections more accurate and secure? Forget the voting machines and focus on the weakest elements of the election process, absentee ballots and voter registration.
No, remember the voting machines while also focusing on absentee ballots and voter registration. Security is hard and tedious - if you want the voting system to be secure, you have to secure every weak element of the process, not just the weakest.